My grandma archives food. Her pantry contains foods which literally expired last millenium. She fills her freezer chests with unlabeled takeout containers, desserts from Trader Joe's, and half-full slush drinks from Starbucks/Costco/Jamba/etc. I am unsure whether to consult Marie Kondo, an archaeologist, or a priest. True story: my wife once found a cat in her great aunt's refrigerator. They loved that cat but couldn't find the time to cremate its remains. Today is May 18, 2026. This i...

Amazon employed 1,576,000 people worldwide as of December 31, 2025, according to the company’s annual SEC filing. That figure makes it the second-largest private employer on the planet, behind only Walmart and its 2.1 million associates . This post covers Amazon’s workforce size, historical growth, country distribution, demographic breakdown, compensation data, and the 2025-2026 layoffs reshaping its corporate ranks. Amazon Employee Statistics 2026 – TL;DR Amazon reported 1,576,000 ...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-45584 for the project Microsoft Windows , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a memory safety vulnerability resulting in arbitrary code execution inside the virus scanner Windows Defender. This is due to the affected components being written in C++, the only programming language where these vulnerabilities regularly happen. "This was a terrible tra...

WASHINGTON (May 19, 2026 ) — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building state-of-the-art autonomy software and aircraft, today announced that the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (OUSW R&E) has selected Shield AI to integrate its Hivemind autonomy software onto the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) , a new class of low-cost, one-way attack drones often referred to as kamikaze drones designed to operate in large numbers. The LUCAS program, d...

At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP , a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT . Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone. The system is still in development, but existing prototypes have 20ps of phase synchronization jitter, and time synchronization down to 30ns. The next generation will have time down to ...

The second episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 2, I chat with Alexandra , the author of xandra.cc , a founder and barista at the 32-Bit Cafe . We talk about, among other things, building indie web communities, communicating the possibilities of having a personal website to new audiences, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. 32-Bit Cafe The second episode of Wonders...

“Well, I’ve made up my mind, anyway. I want to see mountains again, Gandalf.” ― The Lord of the Rings Wānaka is a smaller, less commercialized resort town compared to Queenstown , with a population of around 13.000, but it's as exciting. On my way to Wānaka, I've had a quick stop at the Crown Range Lookout , which offers an amazing view over the Queenstown area — especially during the golden hour. Once reaching a cozy hostel in Wānaka, I was greeted by a fitting na...

I just got back from a three and a half week trip to Japan. It was the longest trip I have ever been on (aside from studying abroad in Germany, which felt different). I made the following wild circuit with only a backpack and a duffel: Tokyo Toyama Kanazawa Nara ish Ito Hakodate Nikko Mashiko Karuizawa Tokyo This trip was split into three parts: time with my immediate family, going to a conference, and then time with my partner. They were all great...

A major shift in the housing market in the last several years is the rapidly increasing popularity of “build-to-rent” homes — single-family homes that are built specifically for the purpose of being rented out. According to the National Association of Homebuilders , build-to-rent homes have risen from less than 2% of new housing starts in the 1990s to more than 7% of housing starts today. In 2025, at least 68,000 new single-family housing starts were built to rent (and due to data limitat...

In April last year, Kelsey Piper discovered that OpenAI’s o3 model was surprisingly good at figuring out where a photo was taken from. Like human “geoguessr” pros , o3 could sometimes take a nondescript photo of a beach and tell you exactly where it is. Here’s the example Kelsey gave: Several people reproduced this with good results: not a 100% success rate, but clearly far better than you’d do with a random human guess. The lesson here is that m...

In 2005, a Dutch startup called Booking.com offered hotels a deal: list your rooms on our platform for a 12% commission, and we will send you customers you would not otherwise reach. Hotels signed up; travelers followed, because the inventory was there, and by the early 2010s, Booking.com was the dominant hotel search platform across Europe and much of Asia. Then the commissions started climbing. By 2019, many hotels were paying 25-30% per booking, plus additional fees for “preferred placeme...

Let \(f\) be a function mapping binary strings of length \(m\) to strings of length \(n\) with \(n>m\). Since there are more strings of length \(n\) than \(m\), \(f\) is not onto. Can you find a string not in the range? This is known as the range avoidance problems, or AVOID for short  Let's do an example. Consider \(f\) that outputs an undirected graph on \(n\) nodes and takes as input: \(n\) A set \(S\) of \(k\) vertices \(v_1,\ldots,v_k\) For each \(i\) and \(j\), \(im\). Since there are mor...

This is how I start new blog posts: $ ./new.sh permalink-for-new-post This sends a command to Hugo, the static site generator I use, to create a new file with that permalink, and generate the requisite front matter (dates, default categories, etc). It also derives the title of the post from the permalink. For example, this is how I started this post: $ ./new.sh i-just-realised-something I don’t normally do clickbait titles. But in starting this post with such a title, I forgot what...

Converting a 64-bit integer to its decimal string representation is a mundane task that shows up everywhere: logging, JSON serialization, CSV output, debug prints, etc. In C++, you might use std::to_chars , sprintf , or some library routine. How do these functions work? At a high level, they repeatedly divide by ten. Start with your integer k . Divide it by ten, use the remainder as the last digit (it is between 0 and 9 inclusively). You then add the code point value of the character 0 to...

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a Linux distribution derived from Chimera Linux , and it’s now available for download. The distribution is called Casuarina Linux. It swaps out musl in Chimera for glibc to gain more binary compatibility with the wider GNU/Linux ecosystem. GNOME desktop on Casuarina Linux. Most of the heavy lifting was done by q66 in creating Chimera Linux. I used that excellent base to build C...

AI models are very capable and get more capable each year. So naturally people feel they’re underusing them. There’s a tweet that goes like: your laptop has a 100M USD startup in it, you just have to figure the right sequence of words to get it out. And beyond money, people imagine AI could boost them in every area of life. Thus all these perennial ideas: of an AI executive assistant, an AI tutor, an AI that curates your “digital garden”, an AI that (sigh) writes flashcards for you. T...

Vibe coding is building a software application by prompting an LLM, telling it what to build, trying it out, prompting for changes - but without looking at any of the code that the LLM generates. This technique can be used by people without any knowledge of programming. However the resulting software often shows problems with maintainability, correctness, and security - so is best used for disposable software written for a limited audience. The term was coined in February 2025 by An...

Dimster = DIMensional teSTER for Apache Kafka On GitHub: https://github.com/dimster-hq/dimster Most of my career in distributed systems has been as a tester, performance engineer and formal verification specialist. I’ve written performance benchmarking tools in the past, for RabbitMQ and Apache Pulsar but in recent years I’ve used OpenMessagingBenchmark (OMB) to run benchmarks against Apache Kafka and other messaging systems. But OMB is hard to deploy and has several limitations compared to...

Today at Google I/O, Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash . This one skipped the -preview modifier and went straight to general availability, and Google appear to be using it for a whole lot of their key products: 3.5 Flash is available today to billions of people globally: For everyone via the Gemini app and AI Mode in Google Search For developers in our agent-first development platform Google Antigravity and Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Android Studio For enterprises in Gem...

I find the trend of people posting about the way they use generative AI to be fascinating at an anthropological level. I do not remember the last time a piece of technology pushed so many different people into writing about the way they use it, or not use it, or abuse it, or misuse it. To me, this is way more interesting and intriguing than the technology itself. I obviously do not know why so many people are doing so, and I suspect they must all have their own specific reasons, but I currentl...

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I had a picnic this weekend and at it I gave Phil a pen plot that I had been meaning to for a while: I want to explain it here because I think it's cool! This was drawn with a pen plotter, which is a kind of robotic arm that you can place a pen in, and program to draw very precisely. The result is that you can get crisper lines, that were drawn with a pen instead of inkjet (which also means you can get different kinds of inks). As a piece of art, what I like about it is that while its st...

EDIT: of course this was already done in the past! I had little doubts but people just confirmed me about it on Twitter :) But, keep reading: the CRC32 compromise at the end is an interesting tradeoff, and this is a good discussion to have in general. Right now I'm working to an agent for my DS4 project. Local inference is token-poor, it's a battlefield where optimizations count. I was quite surprised by the fact the EDIT tool everybody is using right now forces the LLM to emit the old versio...